Beware the Cosmic Interloper!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (the irony of that expression will shortly become evident), you probably already know about a unique astronomical event that transpired the other evening – on November 8th, around 7:30 PM AST, a rather large (think “aircraft carrier large”) piece of spacefaring debris, sexily named by scientists 2055 YU55, passed within 202,000 miles of our home world. At risk of publicizing how desperately out of the loop I can be sometimes, I must confess I wouldn’t have even known about this if not for a Facebook friend who mentioned our Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s rather catchy turn of phrase, referring to the mass as a cosmic interloper. Apparently this is a recognized term (although the equally cool, Pink Floydian interstellar interloper is used more frequently), and I fell in love with it immediately.

For the visually-oriented of you, here’s some video of this bad boy, courtesy of NASA:

So, anyway, I loved the sound of “cosmic interloper” so much, I felt inspired, that very evening, to write a little musical homage to 2055 (if I may be so familiar to presume to be on a first-name basis). Please understand, I undertook this project in full awareness that, although there were no predictions that it was on any sort of collision course with Earth, if it HAD hit us, it would have left a crater 4 miles wide and 1600 feet deep – or created 70 foot tsunami waves if it’d hit water, possibly rendering my efforts something that ultimately only I would ever hear, not to mention making this little exercise my final actions on the planet – though I can think of far worse ways to go.

It’s now Thursday afternoon as I write this, and we’re still here, though, and I am pleased to share with you the final outcome, in its unpolished glory. I can always think of things that I might do to improve it, or make it more dynamic or subtle, but the idea of these little exercises, which I love (but rarely share) is to produce something based on a quick turnover (about 3.5 hours, kids!) and an emotional/evocative subtext. Here’s what I came up with – imagine you’re floating in the vast gulf of space, maybe somewhere between the Earth and the moon, and suddenly you see this massive obsidian orb wheeling its way towards you, just missing you, and then watching in bewilderment as it silently and impassively moves on, as dark and unknowable as Leviathan. That’s kinda what I was going for.

Anyway, let me know what you think – this was a lot of fun to write, and I think I’m going to start to use events like this to jump start more exercises like this. Better yet, if you know of an event or theme or person that could benefit from the Evil Twin “treatment”, send me a note! I take requests.